I think my family are probably glad that I’m done reading Jenny Lawson’s books. They might be able to get more reading of their own done when I’m not interrupting them every five minutes to read out the latest side-splitting passage I can’t keep to myself.

Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Lawson’s first memoir, was fascinating and hilarious, but I think Furiously Happy is in every way its superior. It’s just as funny, with fewer slow bits, but it’s also deeply raw and sometimes dark. Her first book was about her life in general, and since her life has been touched by mental illness then that was a topic she did cover to some degree, but at arm’s length; in this book it takes centre stage.

The title is a reference to a decision she made to be furiously, vehemently, defiantly happy in response to some painful losses and the triggering effect they had on her depression, a decision which started a movement on Twitter among many of her fans who also suffer from mental illness. It’s something that she’s realistic about, acknowledging that it doesn’t mean there aren’t days where it’s bad, too bad to get out of bed; that it’s not a cure, but it is a coping strategy.

It’s perhaps funny to say that in a book where she focuses far more on her mental health issues, she actually seems a lot more together, but I think for a reader who has personal experience with mental health problems then it makes a good deal of sense. Being open about the bad things frees you, somehow, to be more open about the good. I try to be aggressively honest with myself and others about my depression and anxiety disorders and the effects that they have on my experiences, and doing so has improved my communication in many other ways, and I think that’s probably what comes across so strongly in Lawson’s writing here. She doesn’t seem to be trying so hard and just reads as more authentic in her own quirky, hyperbolic way.

And there is good here, and it can be understatedly beautiful. One chapter that stays with me is when she’s having a panic attack and an arthritis flare-up in New York (a combination I can wholeheartedly sympathise with), and then it begins to snow, and she’s outside barefoot and bleeding in the snow, taking in this magical moment that wouldn’t have happened without her illness. I mean, the snow would have happened, because presumably she doesn’t have magical weather control abilities, but not her appreciating it the way that she does. I have my own memories of such moments, albeit with less snow and blood, and there’s a profound peace that comes with the realisation that while the illness is and will always be awful, it is a piece of you that gives you a perspective into things that most people just can’t see, and that’s a feeling that she does a really good job in putting onto the page.

I can also now understand why she and her husband are a good match. (Even if he is a Republican. Eww.) They have a yin-yang sort of relationship it seems, where they balance each other out but there’s a little piece of the other within each. I think sometimes it’s still a little hard to see what they share, but it also stands out less than it did in the first book both because this is less focused on her life story and more on her current-day emotional landscape, and because letting this be a more emotional book seems to have allowed her to capture on the page the underlying affection for Victor that I thought was awkwardly absent from Let’s Pretend This Never Happened.

I do wonder how much this would have held together without any familiarity with her original memoir, especially for readers who aren’t familiar with her blog, so even though this is the better book I would suggest reading Let’s Pretend This Never Happened first to get a feel for how her life up until now has shaped who she is as a person. And for anyone who’s already read that book, I think this is better written and less manic, but if her stream-of-consciousness style of writing bothered you there then it will probably still bother you here.

But I think Furiously Happy may very well deserve a place on my favourites shelf, and particularly for anyone who’s dealt with mental illness or the mental illnesses of loved ones, I think that under all the laughter this will be a poignant read. It’s incredibly cathartic when you come to understand that funny and awful aren’t mutually exclusive, and Lawson offers a charming, awkward, and extremely relatable object lesson in it.